Worse than tests.

Tests are a chance to showcase techniques. What goes on at tests, though, is often more about nerves than it is techniques. Perhaps, if we were being picky, it would be more accurate to say it's about techniques in the midst of nerves. Either way, nerves have a lot to do with it. The thing about nerves is that the bruises and scars they leave last much longer than those of punches and kicks.

At tests, uke and nage both get both kinds of bruises and scars.

The upcoming test is now the most-recently-passed test. I took--this is an estimate, of course--about two-hundred falls. Add another fifty or hundred to that for the class and free practice before the test. And, I'm not saying that all didn't hurt; quite the opposite, it hurts right now down the whole length of my legs, arms, and back. I think there's a bump forming on the back of my head. Something's wrong with two or three of my fingers, and there's probably more to come as my body continues its conversations with me. Much more painful were the few genuine goofs committed.

The goofs hurt both those who pulled them and me, watching them. They took the forms of lapses in etiquette, mistakes in technique, and a simple social faux pas. You try to teach them better; they try to learn. You both cringe when what was more than adequate preparation turns out to have been just not enough. This post has turned out morose, when my overriding feeling of the day is actually satisfaction: about a dozen friends went through a trial today, and they handled themselves, on balance, with grace, poise, and skill. Be it a sin or not, I am proud of them. That's no small joy... There's just no ibuprofen for regret.

The Next Day, Delayed.

The leg is there. No denying it; the leg is there. However, everything is a little more motile than I'd expected. What pain persists serves, mostly, as a reminder to keep stretching, both before and after practice, and just about any other free moment of the day, in the hopes that I might one day walk, once again, in a manner unlike that of a pirate.

This just-enough-nagging brand of hurt had me looking around the mat last night. Mostly, I know my fellow students' longer-lasting ailments. I know who has the truly bad knee. The guy who needs the hip replacement but refuses the surgery. The woman whose wrists always, always hurt. Last night's was an interesting study. We all watch the same sensei, then we do innumerable, personal variations on that central standard. A little more apparent than usual last night was the fact that our personal derivations from the source often take one of three forms: response to pain; aversion to pain; and laziness. There's a second, huge category, of simply not getting it, with its own sub-categories, but that's a different post under a different topic on some future day. I was reminded last night in a very visceral way that, just as we aim to avoid hurting our uke in the process of blending--for the sake of his reflexive cooperation, and circularity, and morality, etc., etc., etc...--the path we take and the form we use to accomplish that blending has quite a lot to do with avoiding hurting ourselves.

This is something I hadn't thought of in a while. How much horse stance hurts; and just plain-old hanmi. Especially when you're just starting out, or nursing an injury, and probably in the practice of later years, just standing still can be incredibly, unendurably strenuous. Maintaing that posture, while dealing with someone flinging hands and feet and headbutts at you? Well: there's your difficulty right there. Aikido's hard becuase standing upright is hard. Our evolutionary ancestors knew all about this pain; Aikido reminds us of it.

The worst is when the hurting stops.

Last three weeks, there's been a leg issue. Below the butt and above the thigh, there's a muscle, a big one, that I think doctors refer to as notchurassitol. (That makes more sense if you say it aloud and fast.) Anyway, that muscle has been roasting itself over a campfire, or taste-testing Naga Jolokia peppers, or maybe just snorting melty glass. This particular pain hasn't made it any higher than my list of secondary concerns, because it's not like it hurts all the time. It's only a problem, really, when I roll, stand up, or take a step. Or stretch my legs in any way. So, basically, it hurts like hell on earth, but only each time I take a fall.

Tonight, over three hours of practice, I took somewhere right around three hundred falls.

And yeah, my leg hurt pretty much every time I stood up from one of those. That is, until somewhere in the third hour. It was at that point that the hurting, well, seemed to go away. I didn't realize this until later, because at the time, I was too busy being sure not to get punched in the face or thrown into a wall. After class, though, during what has become, over these last three, pained weeks, my usual limp to the car, I realized the pain was gone.

Yea! Right? I can live a pain-free, happy life as a pimp. Or a safety and quality inspector of crutches. Or maybe a professional hop-scotcher. Right?

Wrong: the limp was still there. My body has played this trick on me before; I know exactly what it's up to. It cripples me with pain for a time, until I'm no longer thinking clearly, then it pretends to go away, like a cheater at hide-and-seek (who stomps his feet as if running away while actually just standing in place), only to come back, and soon, with a vengeance. I'm sure there's some science I could only half-guess at that would explain this dynamic, but I don't need it. All I need to know is that the limp has stuck around after the pain has subsided, which means tomorrow the leg will hurt even more than it did before, and tonight's is perhaps the worst--because the most insidious--suffering of all: the anticipation.